from an Amazon lay reviewer of Gutenberg Galaxy:
Gutenberg Galaxy is the original book that describes how the “fact of the presence of a particular “medium”, in this case printing, changes knowledge and how we perceive knowledge
The Greeks had writing but not printing. At one time Homer’s long “poems” were an oral form transmitted by memorization and recital, not by writing. Homer’s mythologies were changed by writing them down on long scrolls using the Phonetic alphabet. Somewhere after that we had Socrates and the culture of symposium in Athens, and the “school of Athens, whereby Plato preserved but of course also changed the knowledge of Socrates by writing it down. Live Socratic method is different in important ways than knowledge on a written page.
But the written scroll became the form of knowledge that Plato passed on to Aristotle. Which managed to exist in libraries in Constantinople for a 1000 years beyond the “Fall of the Roman Empire”. We tend to think that the sacking of Rome during the 400s was the end of the Roman Empire. However, the empire had previously split, and was in many ways being run from/by the Eastern part under Constantine. This eastern part of the empire maintained the high levels of scholarship and art and government and law that we think of as the basis of Roman and Greek civilization.
Rome did in fact descend into the dark ages circa 400 AD, but there were monasteries in Ireland that preserved some knowledge by copying scrolls into manuscripts, and “Illuminated manuscripts”.
More comprehensive collections of Greek and Roman knowledge in the form of scrolls and manuscripts existed in Constantinople along with the scholars who understood them, until that city was under siege and then fell around 1450 AD, at which time the scholars and their scrolls made their way to western Europe.
During this same era, the Renaissance began in Europe…sparked by various factors but heavily dependent on the new (but old) knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans, arriving from Constantinople. The renaissance was also driven by the invention fo the printing press which as McLuhan said, created the Gutenberg Galaxy in the 1440s. A lot of change was occurring during that period!
Literary culture was most influenced by the advent of printing. Quick, mass reproduction of texts meant a wider audience. Textbooks were cheaper, and therefore more widely available to students from primary school to college. Shakespeare had access to Greek and Latin classics in his small grammar school in the country town of Stratford-on-Avon.
Of note: there were forms of printing in use in China long before the “printing press” of Gutenberg, Some involved actual moveable “type” based on ceramic characters, but the phonetic languages in Europe involved only 26 “letters” along with punctuation marks. Whereas the Chinese writing involved thousands of “characters”…so…in the end, wasn’t really the same invention.
Europeans, however, took to movable type quickly. Before the invention of the printing press — sometime between 1440 and 1450 — most European texts were printed using xylography, a form of woodblock printing similar to the Chinese method used to print “The Diamond Sutra” in 868.